Fiddles, Not Violins

The Secret to Ray Price and San Antonio Rose

You
got that thing on? I hope you don't print it like I'm sayin' it!" Seventy-year-old Ray Price ("going on 71 with a bullet")
of Perryville, Texas, son of Walter and Clara Bradley Price, has just looked up
from the glass of sippin' whiskey and accompanying glass of orange soda in his
hands, having seen that the recorder was switched on when he least expected it.
All the better to get some honest answers, see?

"You will clean it up, won't you?" he presses. Price turns to the
entourage of sidemen and tour crew and notes slyly, "Boy, I know that when a
reporter tells you that, it's juuusst right!"

What Price has to fear, outside the printing of some off-guard raw language or
an occasional bawdy aside, is mysterious. Certainly he doesn't seem too worried
about the publication of tart observations like, "Well, Nashville is
Israeli-occupied territory," but maybe Price is feeling fearless now that he
knows he'll finally be entering the Country Music Hall of Fame this year,
alongside Patsy Montana and Buck Owens.

"I was beginning to wonder if they was gonna wait until I died!" says Price
before muttering about problems with at least one member of the nominating
committee. Price's nomination is timely, though, coming as it does in a year
which has seen Koch International reissuing two of his Sixties landmark albums;
the Bob Wills tribute, San Antonio Rose, and the similar vintage
Nightlife album. Anal-retentive-to-the-extreme German reissue house Bear
Family has also compiled one of their notorious billion-CD box sets on Price
containing every hiccup the artist committed to tape during his heyday.

Then again, even without such retrospective interest, Price should've been
inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame years ago. His contribution is
undisputed. One listen to his landmark 1956 recording of "Crazy Arms" tells the
entire tale: There had been honky tonk music before, but not like this.
Claiming the sound was a fluke of instant studio inspiration, Price's secret
was the use of massed, double-stop fiddles (not violins --
fiddles!) and a toughened rhythm section. Because of this, "Crazy Arms"
created a groove that kicked as hard as the nascent rock & roll sound which
was then kicking traditional country music, and remained on the charts 45
weeks.

Yes, Price had hits prior to that, chiefly the now-standard "Release Me," but
he had no identifiable sound. Instead, he was mostly notable as Hank Williams'
protege. Price had met Williams while attending what would later become the
University of Texas at Arlington where he studied veterinary medicine, and
recorded a few singles for the tiny Bullet label. When Price joined Dallas' Big
D Jamboree, he was introduced to Williams, who took a shine to the young
country neophyte and convinced him to move to Nashville.

"Hank got me on the Grand Ole Opry," Price recalls, "and then I lived with him
about a year before he died. I lived upstairs, he lived downstairs. Hank only
had one problem: It was only with drinkin'. It wasn't with drugs.

"We was big buddies. But he was working an awful lot, and I was really looking
after him more than anything else, 'cuz he was a bad alcoholic. But not like
most people think. He never would work when he went to drinkin'. He'd stay in
the hotel room. Then the promoter would have so many people there and would
lose so much money, they would go and drag him down there drunk. And that's
when he would make drunk appearances. In other words, he was a human, like
anybody else."

Price's first records under his Columbia contract featured the backing of
Williams' Drifting Cowboys, and despite their quality, they cut a little too
close to Hank's groove for notability. Price also "made one tour with Hank in
'52. We played some dates in Virginia and South Carolina, New Year's Eve and
everything. He didn't make the first two dates," Price laughs.

"Hank Williams," he continues, "was the hottest damned thing in the world, as
far as country music, and they put me out there to fill in for him -- in front
of about 10,000 people in Norfolk. So, I didn't know what I was gonna do. I was
scared to death. I started doing this song -- I had to use his band -- and I
didn't know what key I did anything in. Went out there cold, and I told
'em the key on the song, and hell! It must've been two keys too high! The name
of the song was `I Made a Mistake, and I'm Sorry.' And I got up to the `I Made
a Mistake' part, then I sang, `...and I'm too damn High!'" he laughs.

"I stopped, and the people went ape. I could've done anything after that.
Anything! It didn't make no difference. They was with me, God love
'em."

Quickly sobering up, Price adds, "But yeah, I guess I was Hank's best friend.
Everywhere he'd play, he'd tell everybody about me and to look out for me, that
I was gonna be Number One someday. I didn't even know he was doing it until
after he died."

It took awhile. It took Price's hiring the Western Cherokees, a hard-driving
Texas honky tonk/Western swing outfit, away from Lefty Frizzell in 1954 and
renaming them the Cherokee Cowboys. It also took "Crazy Arms," with its
hardened bass-and-drum pulse wed to a walking bass line. With further hits like
"Heartaches by the Number" and "My Shoes Keep Walking Back to You," the Ray
Price Sound caught on quickly. In fact, the sound became so inescapable, it
even crept its way into the pop mainstream via a Nashville-cut: Elvis Presley's
early Sixties hit, "She's Not You."

"Elvis and I was buddies!" Ray yelps. "I used to play... I believe it was the
Lakeside Ballroom in Memphis every Friday night, years ago. And at
intermission, Elvis would play, just him and his guitar. He was a nice kid, a
really nice kid. But what he went through," Price adds, suddenly grim, "for
what he got, I wouldn't have done it. Shit, he was locked up all his life. I
don't believe in that."

Sam Phillips once said that if Presley had been allowed to walk the streets of
his own hometown without being bothered, he'd still be alive today.

"That's right. But that's the way it was. He had a big fight with Tom Parker.
He wanted to go to town and get him some ice cream, then go to a movie. Tom
Parker said, `You do, and when you get back, our deal's up. I'm gone. You
agreed that you would stay hid all the time out of public as long as we're in
the business.' Now, that actually come about. And [Presley] believed him.
'Course Tom Parker was nobody without Presley, know what I mean? He was a smart
man in the business, because he'd handled Eddy Arnold, and I think Hank Snow.
But I'm talking about the big money way. Tom Parker was nothing 'til
Presley."

Price pauses, then allows himself a slight bit of swaggering: "But we knocked
`Heartbreak Hotel' off the Number One spot (on the country charts) with `Crazy
Arms.'"

The hits kept coming and Price gained a reputation for having an ear for
budding songwriters. Among those he gave breaks to: Harlan Howard ("Heartaches
by the Number"), Mel Tillis ("One More Time" and "Heart Over Mind"), and Bill
Anderson ("City Lights"). With "Invitation to the Blues," Price put royalties
in the pocket of his drummer, an upstart songsmith by the name of Roger Miller.
The Cherokee Cowboys, in fact, became as much a breeding ground for future
country stars as Ernest Tubb's Texas Troubadours, whipping into shape a number
of young bucks, such as steel legend (and now occasional Don Walser sideman)
Jimmy Day. When Donnie Young abandoned the bass guitar slot in the Cherokee
Cowboys to play with Johnny Paycheck, his replacement was a recent arrival in
Nashville named Willie Hugh Nelson. It's Nelson's rhythm guitar which graces
San Antonio Rose.

By Price's guess, the 1961 San Antonio Rose was one of the first
tribute albums ever released. It certainly predates Merle Haggard's own Wills
salute, A Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World, by nearly
10 years. Unlike Haggard's record, though, which sought to faithfully recreate
the Texas Playboys sound (and in the process helped spearhead the Western Swing
revival), Price's record saw him taking Wills' classics like "Roly Poly" and "A
Maiden's Prayer" and making Ray Price songs out of them -- treating them all
like "Crazy Arms." Price shrugs it off, muttering "That's how we try to do all
of them." But this is Price's genius, and the mark of a true artist: Never ape
someone else. Create something of your own. Reach inside, find something
uniquely yours, rub that all over the material, and leave it standing as 100
proof Price.

After a time, it was hard to find 100 proof Ray Price records anymore. Records
like "For the Good Times" found Price going the Eddy Arnold route, testing the
MOR market with string-laden ballads that smacked more of a Vegas showroom than
a honky tonk. Those weren't fiddles you heard on Ray Price records, anymore.
Those were violins.

"I've always done my hit country songs," Price protests. "And we've always
done them with the old sound, even when I worked with the symphony. I just
leaned a little more toward the old sound later on, when it started getting
hard to hear anymore."

It probably began with the duet album Price cut with Willie Nelson in 1980,
also titled San Antonio Rose. The following year, a PBS broadcast
featuring seminal Fifties honky tonkers showcased a Ray Price who looked as if
he was out for blood. There was a lean, hungry look in his eye, and he leaned
into Vintage Price standards like "Crazy Arms" and "Heartaches by the Number"
and nothing else for 15 minutes, singing with strength, clarity, and the joy of
a man freed from a dungeon after 25 years. Price mopped the floor with his
contemporaries. The man was back.

Unfortunately, that was 15 years ago, and today times are tough for Price and
his ilk -- at least in the eyes of Nashville. Although he still does over 100
dates a year, drawing "as good crowds as we ever have," Price has been without
a record deal for some time now. This, however, hasn't stopped him: He's just
cut a Spanish language disc in San Antonio with his musical-director of the
last 30 years, Blondie Calderon. That it's heavy with ballads of the "Por
Los Tiempos Buenos" variety, is neither here nor there.

Price has also begun work on a country album that will most likely be released
on an indie label he and Calderon are setting up, though at this point they
still need to raise funds for both ventures. Strangely enough, one avenue of
fundraising may come in the guise of hot sauce, taken from an old Calderon
family recipe and marketed as "Ray Price's Burning Memories." Meanwhile, what
spare time isn't eaten by fishing excursions on his land near Mt. Pleasant
might find Price writing his memoirs, which the singer jokes he'll title For
the Good Times, My Ass!

"Actually, I'll probably title it The Way It Really Was, Price adds,
levelly, "because I was there when it happened. I know what went down, and I
know what people did. And it ain't gonna be one of them kiss-and-tell jobs."

Depending on the writing skills of either Price or (should he choose that
route) his ghost writer, those non-hot-sauce burning memories of his should
make fascinating reading. After all, Price has seen a lot of history, and
created enough of his own to finally land in the Country Music Hall of Fame.
And you can sense in his restlessness, which is odd in a man of 70, that Ray
Price is itching to create even more history. So long as he fights the urge to
hire violin players rather than fiddle players, that should be no problem.

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